Amazon CloudFront vs. Rackspace CloudFiles CDN Performance

Filed in by Angela Bartels | October 23, 2009 12:56 pm

It’s not enough for us to tell you why you should use our services. We believe that it is more powerful when you hear real stories from customers on how they are utilizing our cloud computing[1] platform. It’s even better when customers are not only using us but also trying out another provider so they can do a comparable analysis. This is the cool stuff.

Chris Meller[2], an Amazon S3 and Rackspace Cloud Servers[3] customer, chose Amazon CloudFront as his first choice for offloading all his static files to a CDN. Being a fan of our Cloud Servers offering, he didn’t want to rule out Rackspace Cloud Files[4]. So he tried both CloudFront and Cloud Files and compared his results.

He did find annoyances on both ends as he quotes:

“So with one minor annoyance on each side of the aisle I turned to hard quantifiable data, something every programmer loves. I loaded up my stylesheet on both CDNs and pointed a Pingdom check at each. The results were surprising.”